Kiss Me Like You Mean It: A Novel Read online

  KISS ME LIKE YOU MEAN IT

  A NOVEL

  J. R. Rogue

  Kiss Me Like You Mean It

  Copyright © 2018 by J.R. ROGUE

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover: Concierge Literary Designs

  Editor: Christina Hart of Savage Hart Book Services

  Proofreading: Author Services by Julie Deaton

  Epigraph poem used with permission by Marya Layth, www.maryalayth.com

  ISBN-13: 978-1986097048

  ISBN-10: 1986097048

  Contents

  Newsletter sign up

  Prologue

  Part I

  1. Hushed And Withholding

  2. Thief

  3. Paper Beauty

  4. Blood Red Life

  5. Hot Tongue

  6. Catch Their Secrets

  7. Forget My Home

  8. I Love Playing

  9. Play The Game

  10. You’re Something Else

  11. Escape Routes

  12. Live Wire

  13. Less Like A Lie, More Like A Fade

  14. You Are Mine, I Am Yours

  15. Metaphors And Lies

  16. Waves Of Regret

  17. Spinning And Spitting Fire

  18. Warm Water And Regret

  19. Bathe Me In Salt

  20. Cheap

  21. To Be Chosen

  Part II

  22. Nothing More Than My Skin

  23. Such A Downer

  24. Words Choked In Throats

  25. Forced Suffering

  26. Push It Down

  27. The Fringes

  28. Fragile, Breakable

  29. Oh, That Bitch Is Insane

  30. Choke On It

  31. Silver Band

  32. Unrestrained

  33. “Do That Again.”

  34. His Mercy

  35. Variety Pack

  36. The Heart Is A Beast

  37. Yet To Come

  38. Love Me Less

  Part III

  39. August Was In My Heart

  40. You Tried

  41. Broken Glass

  42. Thin Ice

  43. Resentment

  44. Just Sad

  45. I Was Silent

  46. I Loved The Lie

  47. A Child Of My Own

  48. Invisible Clock

  49. A Bigger Monster

  50. Bloomed

  51. The Mother Of My Children

  52. Part Of Myself

  53. I’m Not Supposed To Feel This Way

  54. I Did Not Reach For Her

  55. I’m Saving You

  Part IV

  56. Crime Scene

  57. Like Legit In Love?

  58. Pity, Not Love

  59. Silent Mourning

  60. Two Crashing Cars

  61. A Coward And A Liar

  62. Heart In A Glass Jar

  63. Spent Of Salt

  64. In Some Way

  65. Easy And Devastating

  66. Easy To Romanticize

  67. Past Repeating Itself

  68. Bad Penny

  69. Anything

  70. Foolish

  71. I Love You, I Love You

  72. Love Is Never Enough

  Part V

  73. One Small Solace

  74. She Is The Sea

  75. Someone Like You

  76. It’s All Shit

  77. My Perfect Lie

  78. Exhume

  79. Like I Mean It

  Note from Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by J. R. Rogue

  Thank you for buying this ebook.

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  For the women made of shattered glass.

  Deafness is listening to a confession

  and hearing only sin.

  — Marya Layth

  Prologue

  Small Tender Thing

  I know he is calling before the phone rings. I am free falling but I am not. I am safe in my bed next to Logan, but I feel buoyant, moveable, unsure. I jolt wide awake, bend violently at the waist. I clutch my chest but no air comes. When the darkness of my wide bedroom becomes grey, the phone rings. Yes, I know it’s him.

  I pull myself from my sheets and move across the room swiftly, trying to leave my lover sleeping. When I flip my phone over on my dresser, the screen says what I knew it would say. Connor Stratford, my husband, is calling me. My stomach lurches and my legs are waves.

  I grab the phone and leave the bedroom quickly, tiptoeing down two flights of stairs to my dimly lit kitchen. The ringing stops when I take a seat on a barstool.

  I want to call back, but I am frozen, still, and another small tender thing inside of me dies there in that kitchen, at 3:03 a.m. The digital clock across the room laughs at me.

  On the countertop, my phone vibrates angrily. A text.

  Connor: I need to see you.

  Connor: It’s important. It’s what you’re thinking.

  I have been waiting for this moment for a year.

  A divorce. He is ready for the divorce to finally happen.

  I pushed for it when we separated but he shut down, avoided me, changed his number. I was never able to find the fight in me to push further. I just moved away. As far away as I could manage. So he could heal, and be free of my volatile shadow.

  I tell myself every night it's what I want.

  Part I

  1

  Hushed And Withholding

  “Are you going back?”

  “Yes.” It’s a breaking word, and I tell myself Logan is not meant to swallow them.

  “Can’t you just fax some paperwork back there or something?”

  “Yes.” I am honest. Always honest with him. I tell everyone he is a confessional, open book, and open heart. “But I feel like I need to go see him. After everything we did to him, he deserves a face-to-face.” I don't speak of what Logan deserves.

  “It’s been over for a while now. This is all just legal, right? Nothing lingers?” His vulnerability is poetry. His eyes speak when he is hushed and withholding.

  I reach for him, weave my fingers into his. The corner of his mouth turns up and I stretch my calves, go up on tiptoe, kiss him there. “Nothing lingers. I am yours. I can never be anything but yours.” I like to say these things. It feels good to appear open.

  I feel his smile on my cheek and I hope he believes me. When he pulls away, he walks to the little door beneath our stairwell.

  I know what he is going for, so I busy myself with the dishes, wash my hands twice.

  He returns with brown leather and worn pages clutched in his hands. I glance sideways, confirm he has my past in his palms, and stare out the kitchen window into the rain. “What’s that?” I feel my chin quiver a bit, but I master it.

  “Take them with you, for the plane.”

  “Why?” I turn to him.

  I do not look at th
e journals.

  I reach for his hip, run my thumb along the hard lines there. My mouth finds his neck and he sighs. His hands are in my hair and then I’m on the counter, wrapped around him like a vise. “I love you, I love you so fucking much.”

  “I know." His tongue traces my jaw. “He loves you still. He’ll never stop. He’ll try to take back what he thinks belongs to him. I don’t blame him. I don’t hate him. But he can’t have you.”

  The drive to SEA-TAC is quiet. Logan holds my hand, brushes his fingers over my knuckles. His own are white on the steering wheel. I hate jealousy in men but this feels different. He is always so open, dripping onto pages, my skin. This hiding feels more potent. I want to comfort him but I am too lost in my own mind. I grip my journals in my lap. My eyes dart down to my left hand. I reach for my backpack in the backseat, tuck the journals away. Maybe Logan will calm if my past isn’t on my lap. Probably not. My past is on the other side of this nearing plane ride.

  I turn to him, study his jaw.

  “I love you.” I hate that I’ve said it here, in the stuffy car. It feels like an apology. My faithfulness has always been dodgy, Logan knows this. He was the other man. What do they say about cheaters? If they cheat with you, they’ll cheat on you? Yes. That's it.

  I need a drink. I hope they serve them on one of my flights. I have a layover in Dallas. I can get one there if all else fails.

  Goodbyes are bitter when you have no clue what your next meeting will bring. Logan and I have never discussed getting married. It wasn’t important and I have seen the way a title can rip two people apart. Expectations always tasted like copper on my tongue.

  When we hit a red light, Logan puts the car into park. He kisses me and it is not desperate; it tastes like possession. I push aside remnants of past ownership. I open to him. I place my palm on the front of his throat. It’s a brand, and he knows it.

  “Call me when you land,” he says as he pulls away. He looks down and his eyelashes are shiny in the morning light. A car honks at us and the moment is cracked.

  How many men have I loved? Some briefly, some all-consuming. Some for a night, some for a second on a busy street.

  The streets before us are snow covered. Plows have been busy all morning scraping, pushing aside ice, but it keeps falling from the sky. There is no music coming from the speakers of Logan’s Jeep. The sound of the large tires crunching over spring’s last snow drowns out the pounding in my ears. It’ll be warmer in Missouri. I checked the weather every day this week, packing and unpacking.

  When Logan leaves me, I linger on his retreating form. Why give me the journals? I’ve pushed away thoughts of Connor for months. Our last wedding anniversary passed with no thought from me. Sometimes I can’t focus on that day, his presence hanging in the air like an omen.

  What do you do when another year is added to your marriage but you haven’t spoken to your spouse in days, months?

  I would have fought harder for the divorce if I planned to remarry. Instead, I let him have what he wanted, for once. If I couldn’t give in, budge even a fraction during our marriage, at least I could try to in our separation.

  Why did he want to be married to someone who didn’t love him back? No, that wasn’t true. I loved him. But I stopped being in love with him when I couldn't be the pretty picture he wanted. I gave up and ran away. I wasn’t sure where the line was, but I tiptoed over it in my sleep, as I lay in bed with him, a cavern between us.

  You can only go to sleep with tear-stained pillows for so long. With an empty and aching chest. Maybe if I had given him the child he wanted, those thoughts of dying would have been drowned out by the cries of new life. I knew the truth. New life could not push away the desire to end your own. I shudder at those days as I work my shoes off, dropping them in the plastic bin in front of me in the security check line.

  I pull my phone from my back pocket and glance at it before throwing it in the bin next to my Converse. My screen lights up with a text from Connor, below it a text from Logan.

  Connor: I’m scared to see you.

  Logan: I’m scared.

  I text them both back, ignoring the woman behind me clearing her throat as I hold up the line.

  Me: I’ll text you when I land.

  I send it to them both. The same message. Comfort is something I still am not skilled at giving.

  It isn’t often I am recognized in public. I’m no Stephen King.

  The woman who sits next to me at the airport bar isn’t familiar right away but isn’t unknown to me. We run in the same circles. Attend the same book signings. I’ve read her work but have never spoken to her in person.

  She introduces herself and I find myself shaking her hand before I can stop myself. Flesh to flesh is not something I like to do. Her eyes are dark brown pools. She reads my face and I see it reflected there.

  “What are you drinking?” she asks, looking for the bartender.

  “Vodka,” I say, turning away from her face. I am not ready for confessions. It’s too early.

  “Damn girl, you don’t play around.” Her tone is casual.

  Her words, the kind that would make any eavesdropping stranger believe we have known each other for years, make my stomach flip. I just want to be left alone. No such luck.

  I’m only halfway to Missouri and already this trip is shit. I finger the frayed ends of one of my notebooks sitting next to my sweating glass. The bartender serves my new friend and walks away, leaving us alone.

  “How’s your heart?” Just a few words. She drops them casually.

  I choke on the drink I have been holding in my mouth. “What?” I ask, recovering, red-faced.

  “What’s that?” She dodges, pointing to the notebook.

  The blue cover is faded, much like our beginning. I haven’t opened it yet. I’m afraid of the truth there, plainly laid out. I’d rather hide in my novels, my poetry. Reality is much prettier there, hidden in metaphors and man-made magic. “You really want to know?” My voice is cracked, frayed at the edge like the page I’ve flipped to.

  “Yes.” She takes a sip, eyeing my profile.

  “A journal, one of many.” My eyes flicker to my backpack sitting on top of my carry-on suitcase. “I'm on my way to see my husband. My estranged husband.” I watch her eyes darken, a smile forms around her straw. "This is our story.” My voice is low, a thunderstorm.

  “Tell me more.”

  What is it about telling our secrets to a stranger? Why is it easier?

  The eyes meeting mine are warm. I feel hesitant but safe in the telling of this story.

  “Tell me how it started.”

  “The beginning of us? Like, the first day we met?” I stare at my hands, clenched in front of me, high like a knot.

  “Sure.”

  “I stole him, you know. I was a thief. I was as shitty back then as I am now. A friend of mine liked him. And I wanted to do the right thing. But we both know I never do.”

  “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “When you’re good at something, why give it up?” I laugh but it’s the only one that floats into the air around us. It sounds hollow. So I fill the space between us with the story.

  2

  Thief

  I hate myself sometimes. Why am I like this? I'm convinced that love should be instantaneous. Attraction, at least. I know that's foolish, but I can't stop myself. I wasn’t supposed to be looking at him! Why am I thinking about him?

  Last week I was at our friend Charlie’s house with Danielle so we could scope Connor out that night. Connor is her new crush. I looked like hell. I had on these old brown and orange track pants I normally saved for the house. And a grey shirt that had seen better days. My hair was in a messy bun and I had no makeup on. Like I said, I wasn’t there to impress anyone. The guys were sitting in the living room drinking beer and watching TV. Beer made me gag and I didn’t like to drink before 5 o’clock so I declined our friend Blane’s offer of a cold one. Danielle declined too since
she had to drive. Danielle never spoke to Connor while we were there. She talked loudly to our guy friends, which I knew was for Connor’s benefit. I don't know why she didn’t just talk to him. She said they had texted a few times, so why not talk in person? Okay, yes, who am I to talk? I am as shy as they come without a stiff drink in me. So I stayed mostly quiet. I looked Connor over. Listened to his voice. I knew Danielle would want to dissect every inch of him as soon as we got in the car. When we left, she pointed out his own car. A beautiful black muscle car. Our guy friends talked incessantly about cars, so I understood the connection then, why he was friends with our friends. I didn’t think about Connor after I left, except when Danielle brought him up, which wasn’t often. Her crushes often come and go. When I saw him again, I reminded myself that she saw him first. I’m not an only child, but I know I’m spoiled. When I want something, I take it. Why couldn't I just leave this one alone?